OBAMA’S LEGACY: Cancer Patients On Obamacare Are Now Just Left To Die

If the Obamacare debacle wasn’t already enough of a mess, plans now listed on the healthcare marketplace exchange no longer cover cancer treatment at MD Anderson for Houstonians, the nations top cancer hospital.

If you are one of the 2.2 million people living in Houston, TX, then you are out of luck if you get cancer, because there are no cancer treatment centers in town that are covered under Obamacare.

Jenny Deam, with the Houston Chronicle, investigates the disappearance of these plans. She says there will no longer be any plans, by any carrier on the federal exchange for the Houston area, that cover treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. How the marketplace got that way, she says, is a little unclear.

“The PPOs had started disappearing a couple of years ago,” she says. “The last one in Houston was Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and they announced in the summer that they were getting rid of them, that they were no longer sustainable. PPOs with their wider range of network and hospitals… are very expensive.”

In her investigation, Deam profiled one cancer patient, Martha Gardenier, who was told by a doctor that she needed to start making end-of-life preparations. She sought a second opinion from MD Anderson, and began to see her situation improve from Stage 3 to Stage 1 cancer. This experience showed Gardenier that not all doctors who treat cancer are created equal – that she was getting better care at MD Anderson.

Now, it’s as if that carpet is being pulled out from under her. Gardenierwill no longer will have a PPO that will cover the costs as it once did. She’s going to have to pay out-of-pocket for care that could reach $10,000 a month.

“Since that article appeared, I’ve had just dozen of emails, many from other patients who tell the same story,” Deam says. “They specifically got an insurance plan that covered MD Anderson…. [Gardenier is] a pretty stark example of somebody who had been pretty much told ‘There’s nothing more we can do for you,’ and she entered a clinical trial, highly experimental, at MD Anderson. And it worked. People like that don’t want to hear that cancer treatment is interchangeable.”

So much for all the talk during Obama’s campaigns about cancer not bankrupting Americans. Fact is, there is better care available, but Obamacare has been such a drain to insurance companies that they have no choice but to stop covering certain providers.